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Bradford City A.F.C.
Gary Bowyer | coach = | currentleague = League Two | currentposition = | lastseason = 2018-19 | lastleague = League One | lastposition = 24th (relegated) | current = 2019-20 | website = http://www.bradfordcityfc.co.uk }} Bradford City Association Football Club is a football club in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, which plays in League Two, the fourth tier of English football. The club was founded in 1903 and immediately elected into the Football League Second Division. Promotion to the top tier followed in 1908 and the club won the FA Cup in 1911, its only major honour. After relegation in 1922 from Division One, the club spent 77 years outside the top flight until promotion to the Premier League in 1999. Relegation followed in 2000–01 and since then a series of financial crises have pushed the club to the brink of closure and resulted in two more relegations to League Two. In the 2012-13 season, they became the first team from the fourth tier of English football to reach the League Cup Final, losing 5–0 to Swansea City. In the same season, they returned to Wembley for the playoff final and won promotion to League One with a 3–0 win over Northampton Town. The club's colours are claret and amber and they play home games at Valley Parade. The ground was the site of the Bradford City stadium fire on 11 May 1985 which took the lives of 56 supporters. Stuart McCall, the current manager, was appointed in June 2016. Colours and Club Crest Bradford City is the only professional football club in England to wear claret and amber. The club colours were inherited from Manningham FC, when the club converted to football upon Bradford City's foundation in 1903. However, whereas Manningham played in hoops, the new football club adopted claret and amber stripes. Manningham RFC adopted the colours in 1884 before the move to Valley Parade in 1886. Having originally worn black shirts with white shorts, the club's first game in claret and amber was against Hull on 20 September 1884, at Carlisle Road. The reason Manningham chose claret and amber is not documented but it was the same colours of The Prince of Wales's Own West Yorkshire Regiment, which was based at Belle Vue Barracks on nearby Manningham Lane. Both Manningham, from 1886, and Bradford City, from 1903 to 1908, used the barracks as changing and club rooms. Bradford City has worn claret and amber, with either white or black, since it was founded. Since the fire in 1985, the club has used black on the kit as a memorial to the 56 supporters who died. The club's away shirt has traditionally been white and to a lesser extent also blue, but there has been a profusion of other colours and designs particularly in more recent years. The away kit for the 2008–09 season was all white. For the new 2009–10 season, the away kit will be all black with a thin claret and amber stripe down the centre-left. City scarves have also sold in large numbers in recent years to fans of Harry Potter, because the colours are the same as Harry's house scarf at Hogwarts School. A number of other clubs across the world wear claret and amber. They include Scottish club Motherwell, who originally wore blue and white until they wore claret and amber for the first time on 23 August 1913, against Celtic. It is erroneously believed that Motherwell chose the claret and amber colours because they were the racing colours of Lord Hamilton; it is more likely that they were influenced by Bradford City's English FA cup win in 1911. The club's crest combines a series of logos from over the years. In 1974, City adopted a contemporary style crest incorporating the club's initials, with a B-C logo. At the time, the new logo maintained the previous nickname of the Paraders. By December 1981, the club relaunched the Bantams as the official identity with a bantam on the new crest. The crest maintains the club colours and also includes the words The Bantams. External links *Official site *Site of Bradford City's bantamspast museum *Play-off record Category:Bradford City A.F.C. Category:Football League Two clubs Category:Clubs Category:English clubs Category:FA Cup winners